S. S. VAN DINE – The Bishop Murder Case. Charles Scribner’s Sons, US, hardcover, 1929. Cassell, UK, hc, 1929. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and soft, including: Pocket #305, July 1945; Gold Medal T2140, no date given [1970s].

Film: The Bishop Murder Case. MGM, 1930. Basil Rathbone, Lilia Hyams, Roland Young, Delmer Daves. Directors: David Burton & Nick Grinde.

   Of all the criminal cases in which Philo Vance participated as an unofficial investigator, the most sinister, the most bizarre, the most seemingly incomprehensible, and certainly the most terrifying, was the one that followed the famous Greene murders.

   The Bishop Murder Case is not the best of the Philo Vance mysteries, but it is the showpiece of the series, a full out extravaganza that mirrors many of the strengths and weaknesses of the Classic Detective novel of its time — and particularly of the Van Dine brand that became the American model of the Golden Age Detective Story, at a time when Van Dine’s (art critic Wilfrid Huntington Wright) Twenty Rules became as faithfully entrenched on this side of the Atlantic as those of the British Detection Club were on the other.

   The Bishop Murder Case finds the supercilious Philo Vance up against his most dangerous adversary, a Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme killer who calls himself the Bishop, and whose crimes have rhyme, but seemingly no reason.

   With District Attorney Markham, Sgt. Heath, and Dr. Doremus, the dour Medical Examiner, in tow and loyal secretary Van Dine recording it all, Vance plunges right into the murder of Joseph Cochraine Robin, by arrow at the Riverside Archery Club, who died shortly after meeting with Raymond Sperling, Sperling being German for sparrow.

   The clues lead them to the home of Professor Dillard which runs alongside the Archery Club, and an intellectual who’s who of suspects including a physicist, an astronomer, a mathematician, and a chess master.

   And we’re off with a second murder out of Mother Goose as John Sprigg is murdered.

   Clues include a knowledge of Ibsen’s plays, and the Reiman-Christofell Tensor for determining the Gausian curvature of spherical and homolodial space… And it wouldn’t hurt if you were familiar with world class chess, abnormal psychology, the Einstein-Bohr theory of radiation, and the implications of modern mathematical theory that would boggle the mind of Newton and Leibnitz…

   But knowing who the killer is and proving it are two different things, and after the rescue of the young victim of the next planned killing, Little Miss Muffet, Vance turns to the most high-handed action since the great days of Sherlock Holmes to unveil the killer and serve justice, resulting in perhaps the most famous passage in the Vance canon:

   If there is a more perfect example of the Nietzschean superman as detective other than M.P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski I can’t think of one.

   The film with Basil Rathbone as Vance is a major disappointment. Rathbone is flat and reserved as Vance (and it’s hard to take him seriously in that bowler hat), and despite some decent attempts at atmosphere, the whole Mother Goose nursery rhyme motif is used to little effect. It certainly can’t hold a candle to the William Powell Vance films from the same period. Incidentally the Delmer Daves listed in the credits is the future director of films such as 3:10 to Yuma and Jubal.

The Bishop Murder Case hasn’t so much as a moment of reality in it. It is the classic detective novel in its most artificial form, but it is also, for all of its posing and intellectual pretense, a splendid example of the form and Van Dine and Vance at close to their best.

   The Greene Murder Case is likely the best puzzle and formal detective novel of the Vance canon, but Bishop is more fun. Reading it you may understand why Philo Vance once dominated the field and influenced such major writers as Ellery Queen, Rex Stout, and Anthony Abbot.

   Nash may well have been right, but I think for this one, both he and Van Dine also deserve to take a well deserved bow — without risking that inviting boot to the rear end. The Bishop Murder Case is the game played full out and to splendid effect.

LEO BRUCE – Jack on the Gallows Tree. Academy Chicago, paperback; first US edition, May 1983. Hardcover edition: June 1983. British edition: Peter Davies, hardcover, 1960.

   Carolus Deene, history master in an English public school, is recuperating from jaundice at the Royal Hydro in Buddington-on-the-Hill. He encounters the murders of two elderly ladies, each of whom has been strangled and laid out with a madonna lily on her chest.

   It seems that the two deaths must be related, but how? The ladies had not known one another, and had little in common. Deene dips into the mystery, much to the displeasure of his headmaster. At once he is beset by the snobbish elderly cousin of one of the ladies, and by one of his students who is determined to play Watson.

   Along the way he comes across characters who are reminiscent of Edmund Crispin’s books: a farmer whose house pet is an ocelot, an elderly couple who practice both vegetarianism and nudism, two local ladies who vie for the attention of the police and of Deene, and a Miss Shapeley who keeps strong language out of her bar.

   If this is a parody, it is deft enough to be enjoyable as a serious read. Bruce is a pseudonym of the late Rupert Croft-Cooke, who wrote other mysteries under his own name and the Sergeant Beef books under the Bruce cognomen.

Editorial Comment:  Maryell Cleary, who died in 2003, was an ordained minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church as well a voluminous reader and collector of detective fiction. I met her once while she was taking a trip by car through New England. She stopped here to look at my collection and to go through my duplicates, and of course we spent a long, wonderful afternoon talking about each of our favorite characters and authors.

   Maryell was especially fond of mysteries in the Golden Age tradition. In fact, she had a letter in the same issue of The Poisoned Pen as the one above in which she protested mildly that fans of private eye novels had taken over the pages of recent issues! More coverage, she requested, of authors like Martha Grimes, Ruth Rendell, Patricia Moyes, Charlotte MacLeod, Robert Barnard, Marian Babson, Dorothy Simpson and P. D. James.

   To that end she also wrote many reviews and articles herself for the mystery fanzines of 20 and 30 years ago, including the still late lamented Poisoned Pen, published for many years by Jeff Meyerson. I’ve conferred with Jeff, and we both agree that she would have liked her reviews to go on after her. They will appear here on a regular basis for some time to come — she wrote a lot of them!

GREGORY DEAN – Murder on Stilts. Hillman-Curl, 1939; Detective Novel Classic No. 17, no date stated [1943].

   There are several things to be sought in a mystery novel. Style, to this reader, is foremost. When the author on page one writes, “He trajected his mind back,” it is a pointer that style will not be found.

   Characterization comes next, and the author fails here, too.

   Finally — though to many readers the most important aspect of a book — comes plot. In this area Dean gives good value for the money, particularly if you actually paid a Quarter for the reprint.

   A good, kindly, thoughtful rich man — most unusual in mystery novels — is murdered in a locked room. Although the murderer’s intent was to have the man’s death appear to be suicide, the murderer botched this aspect rather badly. The rich man was supposed to appear to have shot himself through his blanket while in bed, but there are no powder marks on the blanket.

   The window locks have been wiped clean of fingerprints, as has the safe in the room. Dirty work has obviously been afoot.

   Fourth Deputy Commissioner Benjamin Simon is the investigator here. It is he who deduces murder rather than suicide. He also figures out early on how and who. He doesn’t reveal it, thus being responsible for another murder. At the end of the novel when he finds out why, all is belatedly revealed.

   Unfortunately, the explanation for the murder in the locked room, and a later appearance of the murderer there — while the room again is locked and a policemen is in it — is rather lame.

   This novel will be of interest only to those who collect locked-room puzzles. It also may be of interest to another type of collector, but reviewers’ rules do not allow that information to be divulged.

   (If anyone is curious about the title, which is the only reason I bought the book, the murdered man lived in what was called “the house on stilts,” a dwelling apparently constructed on a concrete arch. I say “apparently” because this is not mentioned in the novel; it is information provided by the paperback publisher.)

Bibliographic Data: From Bill’s review, it is difficult to imagine that there were additional cases in Commissioner Simon’s career, but it is true. There were two others, as a quick reference to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, will immediately show:

DEAN, GREGORY. Pseudonym of Jacob D. Posner, 1883-?
      The Case of Marie Corwin. Covici Friede, hc, 1933. [Dep. Commissioner Benjamin Simon]
      The Case of the Fifth Key. Covici Friede, hc, 1934. [Dep. Commissioner Benjamin Simon]
      Murder on Stilts. Hillman-Curl, hc, 1939. [Dep. Commissioner Benjamin Simon]

MICHAEL CONNELLY – The Narrows. Little Brown & Co., hardcover, May 2004. Reprint paperback: Grand Central, March 2005.

   Harry Bosch is working as a PI when he’s approached by Graciela McCaleb to look into the death of her husband Terry, a former FBI agent, and friend of Harry’s. Terry had presumably died of a heart attack while working on his boat on an extended charter, but Graciela has discovered that Terry’s medication had been replaced, causing his death.

   Meanwhile FBI agent Rachel Walling, exiled to the Dakotas after the botch-up of the serial killer case involving “The Poet” is assigned to a task force near Las Vegas because it looks like the latter has returned with the discovery of the bodies of several men pin-pointed by a GPS device sent to the Bureau.

   Looking into Terry’s death, Harry discovers that Terry was investigating several unsolved crimes and offering his expertise to the local police. Among those cases was one involving those missing men.

   Harry also finds of photos of Graciela and her children, along with a photo of a road sign bearing the word “Zzyzx,” which is where the bodies of those missing men are discovered. So pretty soon Harry is nosing around in an FBI investigation, and Rachel Walling decides to tag along with Harry once she realizes she’s only being used as a stalking horse by her colleagues.

   A pretty good effort. I gather this was the one Connelly wrote to show his displeasure with the way Clint Eastwood adapted his novel Bloodwork by killing off his Terry McCaleb character. It is quite suspenseful and decently plotted.

   Harry even gets beat up somewhat, one of the prerequisites of the PI novel, even though by story’s end he has decided to go back to the LAPD.

DENISE HAMILTON – The Last Embrace. Scribner, hardcover/trade paperback, June 2008.

   Lily Kessler worked undercover for the OSS during WWII, along with her lover, Joseph Croggan, who was killed in a freak accident after the war.

   When during a visit to Joseph’s mother, Mrs. Croggan receives a wire that her daughter, a young actress working in Hollywood, has disappeared, Lily reluctantly agrees to try to find out what has happened to her, and finds herself returning to the city where she grew up and to which she had never intended to return.

   Lily moves into the room that Kitty had rented in a boarding house for girls seeking, like her, to break into the movie industry, Then, after the discovery of Kitty’s body in a ravine, Lily begins her own investigation when it seems the police aren’t making much headway in theirs.

   The Los Angeles that Kitty knew, and that Lily rediscovers, is a competitive jungle, with temptations for the Unwary that, in addition to the traditional producer’s couch, include gangsters and other pitfalls for the vulnerable young women who flock to the area. One of Kitty’s friends, and a possible suspect for her death, is Max Vranizan, one of the more interesting characters, who works with Willis O’Brien on special effects, but whose creative talent has a dark side.

   Lily seems to find a soulmate in an LA homicide detective, but his partner seems untrustworthy, a quality that soon makes Lily wary of her friend, Pico, in a world in which she finds herself increasingly alone, as well as the target of violence that puts her life in jeopardy.

   This is a Hollywood noir, with a definite feminine take on its conventions, and Lily is another of those inquisitive female heroines who get themselves into situations where caution seems to be in very short supply.

   There’s a fair amount of supplementary material that convinces me that Hamilton did her homework and that she has a genuine affection for post-war Hollywood, with a feel for the geography that seems genuine.

   I wish I had liked the novel more, but in spite of the threatening situations in which Lily finds herself, there was too much of a romantic haze to make me feel that she was ever in any real danger. The threats were less real than Lily’s need to recover from her past and move on with her life, which she finally does, in true romance novel fashion.

JARKKO SIPILÄ – Helsinki Homicide: Against the Wall. Ice Cold Crime, trade paperback, 2009. Originally published in Finland by Gummerus as Seinää Vasten. Translated by Peter Ylitalo Leppa.

   The eighth in the police procedural series centered around Kari Takamäki (a male, not female, Kari), the fictional chief of the Helsinki homicide squad (which also handles other serious crime), this is the first in the series to be published in the United States.

   The main character in this outing is Suhonen/Sukkanen, an undercover cop who virtually lives his job. We learn a bit more about the criminals’ personal lives than we do those of the cops. The various cops and crooks quickly become distinct, individual characters, though the names can be a little difficult to keep straight.

   The members of the Skulls gang are truly frightening; the hapless, small-time loser who gets in way over his head eventually draws our sympathy, but that’s cold, cold comfort.

   This is a whydunit, not a whodunit, with a fast pace that makes up for the rather inelegant translation. It’s worth seeking out for fans of Scandinavian crime fiction or those who like a fairly strict procedural flavor to their fiction.

   This book might be hard to find, but you can try Amazon.com and icecoldcrime.com. I purchased it at a Swedish Institute event, had it inscribed, read it, and now have no idea where I’ve put it. That’s my life these days.

   Commentary on books I’ve covered in the New York Times Book Review.   [Reprinted from The Armchair Detective, Vol. 1, No. 4, July 1968.]

    Previously on this blog:
Part 1 — Charlotte Armstrong through Jonathan Burke.
Part 2 — Victor Canning through Manning Coles.
Part 3 — Stephen Coulter through Thomas B. Dewey.
Part 4 — Charles Drummond through William Garner.
Part 5 — Richard H. Garvin through E. Richard Johnson.

HENRY KANE – Laughter in the Alehouse. Macmillan, hardcover, 1968. Paperback reprint: Penguin, 1978. McGregor, retired policeman, wealthy, a gourmet, erudite, sometimes (when so inclined) private detective, is a fascinating addition to mystery lore, and this his third case, involving a left over Nazi and a beautiful Israeli agent, is a solid, tightly plotted affair.

CARLTON KEITH – A Taste of Sangria. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1968. Paperback reprint: Curtis, n.d. Handwriting expert Jeff Green plays private investigator and comes up with some solid detection in this story of a disappearing (with $200,000) accountant.

PETER KINSLEY – Pimpernel 60. Michael Joseph, UK, hardcover, 1968; E. P. Dutton, US, hardcover, 1968. No paperback edition. A good example of what careful plotting and imaginative characterization can do for the novel of intrigue. This one follows a Jesuit priest in an attempt to bring a Russian defector out of Albania.

EMMA LATHEN – A Stitch in Time. Macmillan, hardcover, 1968. Paperback reprints include: Pyramid X-2018, 1969; Pocket, 1975. Pseudonymous Miss Lathen has yet to be unmasked, but she is reportedly two women writers. At any rate her (their) talents are indisputable, and this seventh of Wall Street banker John Putnam Thatcher’s cases is a nice puzzle in an interesting setting, told in witty, beautifully controlled prose.

Editorial Comments: Henry Kane was, of course, far better known as the author of several dozen private eye Peter Chambers mysteries. This is the last of three McGregor books. After 1968 Kane and Peter Chambers moved to Lancer Books, where he appeared in a series of novels that became more and more sexually explicit (that is to say, X-rated).

   Carlton Keith wrote six mysteries, five with series character Jeff Green, of which Sangria is the last. I’ve always meant to read one of them, but so far, I still haven’t.

   Pimpernel 60 is the only novel by Peter Kinsley that has appeared in the US. The other two, both published by Robert Hale, came out in the 1980s.

   It seems strange today that an author could hide her real identities for as long as Emma Lathen did, apparently for as many as seven books. With all of the tools of the Internet available today, I think fans would have uncovered the truth in next to no time. For the record, Emma Lathen was the writing combo of Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Henissart. (You can probably put the pieces together.) They also wrote several mysteries as R. B. Dominic, a fact which as I recall, ace mystery reviewer Jon L. Breen brought to light.

NICHOLAS BLAKE – Malice in Wonderland.

Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1940. Harper & Brothers, US, hc, 1940, as The Summer Camp Mystery. Paperback reprints include: Penguin #592, 1946; Pyramid R-1008, 1964 (later 1971, shown) as Malice with Murder; and Carroll & Graf, 1987, as Murder with Malice.

   Recently published by Carroll & Graf, a publisher which is doing some of the most interesting reprints lately, is Nicholas Blake’s Murder with Malice. This is yet another title for the book which began life in 1940 as Malice in Wonderland (easily its best title) and was reprinted in the United States the same year as The Summer Camp Mystery.

   Oh well, under any title, this is one of the best examples of the late Golden Age of classic puzzles that you’ll find in paperback. Nigel Strangeways is called to investigate strange doings at a holiday camp named Wonderland, where a series of practical jokes — e.g., tennis balls dipped in treacle — by someone who calls himself “The Mad Hatter” have culminated in murder.

   The humor Is sophisticated and the puzzle very difficult to solve. The setting is believable but far enough removed from our usual lives to make perfect escape reading.

Editorial Comment: I wonder if this detective novel holds the record for being published under the most titles. It’s certainly in the running!

DENNIS WHEATLEY – The Devil Rides Out. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover, 1935. Bantam, US, pb, 1967. Many other reprint editions.

Filmed as The Devil’s Bride. Hammer Films, 1968. Released as The Devil Rides Out in the UK. Christopher Lee, Charles Gray, Nike Arrighi, Leon Greene, Patrick Mower, Richard Eddington. Screenplay: Richard Matheson. Directed by Terence Fisher.

   With sales topping sixty million copies (that’s sales, not in print) Dennis Wheatley was one of the best selling writers of the 20th Century. His long list of books vary from mystery, to thriller, to spy novels, to historical adventure, to the occult, to lost worlds, and science fiction.

   His long running series include tales of secret agent Gregory Sallust; Napoleonic era secret agent Roger Brook; Monte Cristo-like Julian Day; and the tales of Duc de Richleau and his team of modern musketeers: American Rex Van Ryn, Englishman Richard Easton and his wife Mary, and Simon Aron, a young wealthy Jewish adventurer.

   The Devil Rides Out is a tale of de Richleau and his friends, and the first of Wheatley’s occult thrillers. It may also be his finest achievement in that genre. Simon Aron has fallen in with the mysterious cult leader known as Mocata, and de Richleau suspects something is wrong. When he confronts Simon, he discovers Mocata has the youth under his hypnotic spell and has drawn the young man into a demonic cult.

   De Richleau recognizes a dangerous enemy in Mocata and summons his friends Rex Van Ryn and Richard Easton to aide in rescuing Simon. Not surprisingly Rex also finds a young woman under Mocata’s rule and sets out to save her after he and de Richleau crash a Black Mass to perform a daring rescue of their friend.

   Now hiding Simon and the unwilling girl at Easton’s country home, they find themselves under siege by Mocata’s occult powers, climaxing in a night long battle of wills between de Richleau and Mocata, with our heroes within a protective pentagram and under attack by Death himself, mounted on a monstrous black stallion, who once summoned never leaves without a victim.

   When Richard and Mary’s daughter is kidnapped by Mocata as a sacrifice to open the very gateway to Hell it is time for a final battle between good and evil.

   I know a good many readers of this blog have little patience with the occult and the supernatural, but despite Wheatley’s sometimes awkward prose and mannerisms he had a real gift for both. (He himself didn’t believe in the supernatural but often wrote about its psychological dangers.)

   Several of his books in the field were classics, among them The Haunting of Toby Jugg, The Ka of Gifford Hillary (something of a tour de force since it is narrated by the hero from a state of suspended animation in his tomb), To the Devil a Daughter, and They Used Dark Forces, a Gregory Sallust WW II spy novel about Nazi attempts to use the occult as a weapon in WW II. Despite these books, he only wrote ten occult thrillers, a small portion of his output.

   Wheatley based Mocata on Alister Crowley, the self styled Satanic mage and Anti-Christ, who was also the basis for Somerset Maugham’s Oliver Haddo in The Magician, and James Bond’s arch enemy Ernst Stavro Blofield. Only a few years later during WW II Wheatley and Fleming would attempt to use Crowley’s occult contacts among the Nazi’s to infiltrate the party hierarchy while they both served in British intelligence.

   Crowley’s real life, mostly spent dodging the law and creditors, was a good deal less dramatic than that of his fictional counterparts. Still, he had a fairly good run as one of the great con men and frauds of the 20th Century, rubbing shoulders with the great and near great from poets like William Butler Yeats and fellow members of the prestigious Golden Dawn, to one of men who built the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos.

   The Devil Rides Out came to the big screen as Hammer Studios The Devil’s Bride with Christopher Lee ideally cast as de Richilieu and Charles Gray as Mocata. (Ironically Gray also played Blofield in the Bond film Diamonds Are Forever.)

   The Richard Matheson screenplay is faithful to the novel and the night long battle with Death mounted on a great black horse a memorable bit of cinematic horror. It’s a first class film, handsome to look at, and played to full effect by a fine cast.

   Despite his best selling status, Wheatley was likely best known in this country for the series of books he did in the 1930’s in the File series (File on Robert Prentice, File on Bolitho Blane), in which he provided the characters and crime and a complete set of clues, from lipstick-stained cigarettes to diagrams of the murder scene for the reader to solve.

   The books had a brief vogue, but ultimately it proved more fun to read about detectives than try to play one — not to mention the tendency to lose the enclosed clues.

   Despite his many flaws as a writer (he once said he never knew a best selling writer who knew the meaning of the word syntax) Wheatley knew how to spin a tale, and like his great literary hero Alexandre Dumas, his books are often highly readable and entertaining once you get into them. A number of his books were filmed, including Forbidden Territory, The Eunuch of Stamboul (as The Spy in White), To the Devil a Daughter, and Uncharted Seas (as The Lost Continent).

   Even absolute howlers like the stand alone Star of Ill Omen, where a British secret agent is kidnapped by Martians in a UFO and foils a Martian/Commie plot to destroy London (and believe me I’m making it sound saner than it reads), have a sort of goofy charm.

   His historical novels about Roger Brook, secret agent to William Pitt, probably received the most critical acclaim. Dark Secret of Josephine, in which Napoleon’s first wife reveals her ties to voodoo in her Hatian homeland, is likely the most successful blend of his chief interests; history, espionage, and the occult.

   But The Devil Rides Out is a first class thriller in the classic form. If you only read one Wheatley novel, this should be the one. The shootout at a Black Mass is worth the price of admission alone, and the siege within the pentagram guaranteed to raise the hackles of the most jaded horror fan. It’s a grand example of the occult thriller at its best.

THE BODY SNATCHER. RKO, 1945. Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Henry Daniell, Edith Atwater, Russell Wade, Rita Corday. Based on the short story by Robert Louis Stevenson. Screenplay: Philip MacDonald & Val Lewton (as Carlos Keith). Director: Robert Wise.

   Compared to the Fredric March version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, reviewed not so long ago here, RKO treated Stevenson rather more faithfully in The Body Snatcher (1945), one of their string of quality “B”s produced by the redoubtable Val Lewton.

   This was directed by Robert Wise in his pre-bomb period, and allegedly written by Philip MacDonald, though he said someplace that Lewton re-wrote the whole thing under the name Carlos Keith.

   Well, it’s a fine job regardless of whodunit; not a really scary pitchur as much as a brooding one, with characters a bit more complex than you usually find in a monster movie.

   Karloff is at his nastiest in the title role, killing blind women and puppies with scarcely a qualm, yet he’s kind to his horse and positively dotes on the little crippled girl at the center of the story.

   Opposite him is the surgeon forced into using the services of a resurrection man to help the little girl walk again, played by Henry Daniell, as cold and constipated as ever. Daniell was one of those actors (like Laurence Harvey. or Dan Duryea) who never made any claim on audience sympathy, and maybe that’s why I like him so much.

   He does nothing very sinister here, yet his palpable heartlessness puts him instantly in the same camp as the Mad Scientists who typically run amok in this sort of thing.

   And when the running comes, it is indeed amok. Body Snatcher is one of those rare horror films with sense enough to save the scariest part for the climax, and ends with a burst of creepy action followed by a grim coda that leaves us feeling we’ve just seen some sobering lesson — even if we can’t say quite what it was.